Blue
by Mariel Nightstalker
Summary: A backstory for Mara's parents.


A/N: Akil means 'intelligent' and Harere means 'flower'. Hey, I was trying to be clever. I'm getting the impression that I failed miserably. Dammit!

Blue

Pacing the length of her shady garden and smiling down at her infant daughter cradled in her arms, Harere wondered when her husband would return from his workplace. She may have been surrounded by handmaidens filled with cheerful words and witty sayings, but nothing quite measured up to the conversations she would engage in with him. His hours had recently been increased because of a particularly difficult dispute between and architect and some Nubian official who claimed that the site they were trying to build a settlement on was sacred despite there being no records of it being so in the previous years. Personally, she believed that there was a possibility of the Nubian just wanting to keep all things Egyptian off of land he wanted for himself, but a stronger one told her that the man was telling the truth and the ground really did have healing power. When the case had only been a few days old, she had arranged to visit her husband at his workplace, but had needed to be carried due to a non-fatal snake bite on the pad of her left foot. A stray wind had blown through the hardened ground, raising particles of it to cling to the gleaming skin of all present.

The injury had been gone when she had had her feet washed that evening before dinner, much to her and the slave's astonishment. According to the priest who had given her the cleansing cream with which to wash it 4 times a day with had explained that the wound was very deep (one of the snake's fangs had actually broken off and become embedded in the sensitive skin) and would take quite some time to heal, and even then she would be marked with a crescent-shaped scar. The skin was currently as smooth as it had been when she was first born. Her child made a playful gurgling noise and batted at one of her braids as it came within her reach. Her smile returned from its faded state and she crooned to the precious girl while smoothing the black hair back from her forehead. Conservative older women had always told her that a woman was supposed to give her child to a nurse immediately after birth so it would grow accustomed to the slave and not wail for her at all hours of the night like some kind of vicious blood-sucking spider. She had allowed her reputation to be questioned, and ignored the half-hidden sneers of her peers, choosing to personally devote herself to her blue-eyed babe who had inherited her eye 'deformity'. A snort made its way out of her throat as she remembered how, as a young child, her father had made her wear her hair long so it hung in her eyes and instructed her to keep her head bowed as if in timidity or respect at all times so no one would notice the bizarre color of her irises. He had been a very influential man who made his wealth by commissioning the construction of temples to their gods in the countries conquered by Pharaoh Thutmose II not too long ago, and had found favor with their god-king as well. She had been kept out of sight, unlike her 5 sister who were paraded about as great beauties before the wealthy unmarried nobles in an effort to enamor at least one of them into marriage.

She had been 13 and sitting alone in the palace garden while the rest of her family were indoors drinking too much and watching the dancers hired for entertainment. Their laughter mixed with that of a hundred others occasionally reached her sharp ears but she felt no desire to join them. Such foolish pursuits held no interest for her, and all the beer in the world couldn't make her feel any more accepted by her proud father. All she wanted was for her strange eyes to disappear so he would be as pleased with her as her sisters and 3 brothers, but deep inside she knew the gods wouldn't hear her prayers. She didn't _deserve _to get what she wanted, to hope for a man or even a woman who would look past her appearance and see her as the person she was. Drawing her knees up to her chest in an effort to conserve her body heat being stolen by the freezing wind of the evening (she could no longer feel her feet within her polished sandals but if the only way to get warm was to go back inside she would rather freeze), she wrapped her arms around them and her head upon her arms at an angle so she could still watch the stars shining so brightly above.

A rustle in the grass not accompanied by wind alerted her that she was no longer alone, so she tried to stand out of respect but ended up collapsing as there was no longer any sensation in her lower half. She groaned and began to rub tiredly at her calves in an effort to restore blood flow, forgetting about the intruder entirely. She was reminded when the whispering of crimped fabric came to her attention from outside of her vision range, which was ridiculously limited with the long fringe hanging into her eyes. Looking over her shoulder from her curled position on the soft grass coated with dew she saw that the stranger was male and kneeled down beside her and was reaching for her knee. Just before his fingers descended on her skin she made an effort to scramble away lest he get too close and by some accident catch sight of her eyes.

"Hey…be still, small one. I only want to help." His voice was soothing, and she imagined he was the type to argue his way out of an execution successfully, which only served to make her more wary.

"The only assistance I require is your absence." She snapped, forcing false confidence into her usually soft voice. He paused, and then a low chuckle came out of his throat. He thought she was _amusing! _Officially offended, she shimmied several feet to the side to create some more space between them. But to her dismay he followed her, practically crawling as he had been kneeling on the grass before.

"Go away!" She hissed, sounding not unlike an ill-tempered snake, and her bad attempts to escape with bad cramping must have looked pretty odd to an observer. He laughed again and slipped an arm under her ribs, which were fragile from hunger as she hadn't been allowed to eat with her family for years and the thought of it tended to make her stomach reject food, and tugged her up until her back was to his chest and her legs splayed out awkwardly before them. He sniggered a bit when she craned her head up to try to glare and pout at the same time, large hands settling on her thin calf and gently massaging the blood back with slow circular movements.

His cloak was warm and it was late…she was tired and hungry and cold and he smelled so good that she began to drift off while her legs smarted a bit from her veins, making her toes twitch. He made no move to stop her from burrowing her nose into his neck and generally making herself at home in his personal space, encouraging it instead by pulling her yet closer under the pretense of trying to reach her feet. "Pretty little girls like you shouldn't be left unattended and all alone like this." He whispered, lips tickling her ear before he kissed her forehead.

A purr came out of her throat before she truly drifted off, no horrific dreams coming to haunt her for the first time in 8 years. The doctors called them night terrors and said that she would grow out of them with age, but she was already past the normal time for children to overcome their fears. Her eyes were rimmed with dark circles and it gave her a ghostly look that she knew frightened even the slaves working in her father's household.

She had awakened the next morning wrapped in his cloak (she knew it was his because two men couldn't have the same smell, could they?) and inside one of the rooms provided for sleepy guests too tired to go home after the parties. Another girl was also in the room, and she recognized her as Ashanti, a prissy young girl forever lording herself over her peers, for no real reason other than she wanted to which never failed to irritate her.

Standing up, she washed her face in the basin provided and slipped her feet into her party shoes from the night before, slipping silently out the door while Ashanti snored on oblivious to all around her. Slaves rushed past her in the early morning light, hurrying to prepare baths and breakfasts for the master and his family. A few smiled at her and she smiled shyly back, not used to friendly faces. Descending the stairs to the ground floor, she walked through the gardens to the stables and politely asked one of the male slaves tending the horses if she could share a ride with someone passing by her house on the way to market or otherwise. The young man smiled at her, a bit wider than strictly necessary too, and informed her that he was just going to pick up some meat at the butchers and if she wouldn't mind riding behind him. She said no, although her stomach was already filling with butterflies for reasons unknown to her, and allowed him to hoist her up by her armpits onto a plain working horse and settled her amongst the many empty saddlebags, soon to be filled with the packages of meat. Normally he would have taken a much slower cart or even the donkey but the butcher was some distance away and speed was needed to accomplish his errand. Having an attractive young girl accompanying him part of the way was a bonus in his eyes, and speaking of eyes the girl had the loveliest and most unusual he'd ever seen. Climbing up in front of her, he smiled inside when her small hands settled around his waist and let him direct the horse through the maze of mansions grouped closely against the outer walls of the Pharaoh's palace.

At home things went back to the way they had been before, but sometimes she would find herself thinking of the one who had been so very kind but peculiar at the same time. In her deepest heart, she knew that one day she would see him again. And when they did, the results of their meeting had created many other little excuses to see each other again, and there had been no nurse to stop them when feelings came into the open air and the unspoken laws of how a man and a woman who were not married should treat each other were violated. Of course, none of that mattered anymore because he had asked her to marry him anyway, and decreed that she shouldn't be ashamed of what the god's had given her lest she offend them. A normal woman would have been fooled by his noble speech, but Harere was well aware of how his mind worked, and saw straight through his excuses to the truth: he just wanted her to be happy. And that was enough for her.

--

Her husband had enemies, she knew, but none of them had ever gone so far as to openly challenge their well-being in plain speech before. She felt shivers go down her spine every time she thought of the happiness she had finally made for herself being ripped away…of her darling child's safety being compromised. Akil had moved them to a freezing new country where women were _born _with pale skin and her eyes were no longer an oddity. But the men found them.

She had been in the library, reading aloud some fairy stories to her daughter when she heard the sickening crunch of their doors being forcefully opened, the sound echoing to her down the stone hallways. Her breath had caught and she grabbed her girl, forcing herself to continue smiling as if nothing was wrong so her child wouldn't become alarmed and begin to cry out. Their silence did no good, as the loud foot steps she could now hear drumming against her ears like the bells of death tolling out their sentence. Terrified nearly to the point of becoming incapable of thought, she had crawled inside one of the slender cabinets, child clutched to her breast to muffle her noises and tugged down a lever that would conceal the contents. It was a trick cabinet her husband had had made for his own amusement, and had replied to her inquiries with "it could be useful one day" and a wry grin.

She had never been so grateful for her husband's eccentric habits, but they did no good because soon the piggish men, hired cutthroats no doubt, had discovered the thin wood was not the real back of the cupboard and had hacked it to pieces, revealing herself and her child, who had fallen asleep in her warm embrace.

They leered and tore the infant from her arms, discussing the likelihood of a slave trader giving them decent pay for her. Harere listened in horror and despair, knowing that her husband was surely dead and there was no hope of surviving the next hour, much less protecting her child, who looked so much like her father in all but the eyes, from a life of misery and hard labor.

She began to sob, and this angered one of the men until he silenced her, forever, with a sharp blow of his sword. There would be no burial for her, but a crude burning side-by-side with their servants and their children. Her husband's body lay on top of hers, his head in the possession of the cruel man who had had done this.

--

Mara sometimes wondered what her parents had been like, and why she sometimes felt a feeling of deja-vu when she saw a sneering noble across the hall of the Pharaoh's palace while she walked by on Sheftu's arm. His eyes had widened when he saw her own, and he had turned his livid gaze on a hired bodyguard standing beside him who resembled a pig to a remarkable degree.

She shrugged the incident off.

--

End.

Yep, another random and confusing Mara ficcy. In case some of you didn't get it, her dad was the ancient equivalent of a lawyer and her mamma was pretty. Review and tell me how much it sucks! Oh, and try to leave signed ones 'cause I like to reply.


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